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Category Archives: Play Aids

A week or so back, Karl Keesler over on Google+ posted this image of his character from a 7th Sea game.

The first thing I thought when I saw this was, “sword toothpicks for hero points! That’s super cute! Much better looking than my doubloons from Party City.”

My second thought was, “how long until one of the players suffers a REAL Dramatic Wound from one of those things? Less than one game session in my library game, I’ll bet.”

But then I noticed that mind blowing tidbit in the upper left. What is that? A bookmark? A rules reference bookmark?? How f*%#ing cool is that! I must have it!

And so Karl and I started a little back and forth about it. Then the bookmark’s designer, Bert Garcia got involved. And soon, this lovely play aid was revealed in all it’s glory.

Of course, by that point, I was neck deep into crafting my own rendition. And not one to leave good enough alone, I had to use both sides and include twice the detail. I’m happy with the results, and one of my players has already asked for a Roll20 version.

So please enjoy this wonderful play aid for 7th Sea 2nd edition. Full credit goes to Bert Garcia for his original design, which you can find here if you want something more minimalist. If any of you are wondering why I’m not releasing this to the Explorer’s Society, it just seems wrong to do anything like that without a full credit (and a share of any profits) going to Bert. Besides, I like keeping all my toys right here where I can find them.

Don’t worry. I have some ideas that will make it into the Society soon enough.

The votes are in, and my group of players have almost unanimously elected to go with a high seas adventure game with strong involvement of secret societies. And with that, prep for our 7th Sea game can really begin in earnest. Not that I haven’t been brainstorming and scribbling down ideas for awhile now, but this gives me a definite direction with which to steer the ship, so to speak.

With the holidays upon us, I am sneaking in whatever time I can manage to do a bit of prep for the forthcoming 7th Sea campaign. It’s coming along nicely. I feel I have quite a few resources collected that will make my work easier when we dive in around mid-January. And since it’s the holidays, I want to share some of the fruits of my labor with you.

So first up, a 7th Sea Ship Name resource. Along with a reformatted version of Finn’s Companion #3 (any of you old hands remember that one?), I’ve included a list of authentic ship names from the 17th Century British and Dutch navies, along with pirate vessels of ill repute. So you can either grab a name from antiquity or mix and match something new for your players to grapple with. This should be of help to anyone running a historical (or semi-historical) nautical game. I’m going to add this resource on the Downloads page as well.

This is something I started working on as a shorthand method for creating interesting villains on the fly. The idea was based somewhat on D&D 3/3.5’s monster templates. Find the archetype that fits your concept of the villain, and you now have a handful of related Advantages you can apply as desired. Not every villain who fits an archetype will have all the recommended Advantages, nor are they limited to just those Advantages. But now the GM has a condensed list of “go-to” abilities for creating villains on the fly, or just as an idea generator.

These archetypes don’t address Arcana or Stats, as those will need to be personalized to the villain.

I hope you find them useful.

Villainous Archetypes

Villainous Archetypes are meant to be broad pictures of a villainous character. They are tools meant to speed up the design of a villain. Find the one that best fits your concept of the villain and then apply the recommended Advantages.

Of all the cheat sheets and references I’ve made for Witch Hunter, probably the most valuable for us has been the Character Creation cheat sheet. It doesn’t get used very much, but it proved its worth when we welcomed a new player a few months back. It’s also very handy for auditing characters.

Having it as a Evernote note has had its ups and downs. So last year, I set out to create a PDF version. The result morphed into something very new. And now I’m making it available here on downloads section.

The Witch Hunter Character Creation Workbook was envisioned as a four-page folio with a double-sided worksheet insert. It walks you through the character creation process, complete with page references and highlighted rules references. The format, I think, is even better than the older Character Creation worksheet. I think Witch Hunter: Revelations players and GMs will find it especially useful. It does make one assumption, that the group will be using the Heroic Power Level (as opposed to Gritty or Cinematic) when it comes to Advancement.